silk-lined gown trimmed with Irish point. I could well imagine what sort of residence hers would be in France. For Ireland it was a sort of Aladdin surprise. Majesty indeed might have sat in that sitting-room. It was furnished with faultless taste: beautiful old Sèvres, proof engravings exquisitely framed, buhl cabinets; everything—curtains, chairs, sixteenth-century benches and couches, quaint ornaments, the spoils of frequent auctions of gentlemen's houses—was chosen with the best of judgment by an ignorant peasant woman, whose bringing up, surroundings, and life had been of the most sordid kind. I was shown the bedroom, and found it a no less pleasing and surprising vision, a nest of modern luxury and beauty, such a bedroom as in Paris you would see only along the handsome and expensive avenues.
Another time I obtained a glimpse of the home of a bankrupt widow of a "little burgess" who had had to vacate a house with grounds to take up her residence in a more modest dwelling. Such a woman in France would be content to live and die a very plain and simple person, and, having had to compound with her creditors, would have considered herself bound to lay out her new existence upon lines of the most rigid economy, above all, as there was a large family of sons and daughters not yet of an age, nor having the requisite education, to provide for
